Figure 1.--This cabinet card portrait shows an unidentified boy sitting on a stool, by a table, with an open book in his hand. He's wearing a dark knee pants, dark stockings, and dark shoes. Note the Fauntgleroy styling, a white collar and floppy bow which along with the mount help to date the portrait to the 1890s. Note the fkairs in the hair. By the 1890s we see knee pants actually cut to knee lengths. Thus long stockings had to be a little longer than those worn with longer-cut knee pants yjat were common earlier. The studio was Hartley in Chicago.

We believe that until the 1890s that long stockings were mostly made to lengths just above the knee. This began to change in the 1890s when boys began to wear shorter-length pants and then by the turn of the 20th century, boys were wearing above the knee knickers or knickers just below the knee. Notice the boys at the Misses Porter's School in a photo taken about 1895. Here the boys wear long stockings with knee pants, but the knee pants are relatively short and the stockings fairly long--certainly longer than mere over-the-knee style. The seem to reach to about mid-thigh. We note the Spencer family, of Pittsburgh, about 1900. Mark, the oldest boy is wearing quite long black stockings with short knee pants. The stockings reach at least to mid-thigh. An ad for Rugby waists (1903) gives a good idea of average stocking length in the 1900s. It is true that some boys wore there stockings much longer than this, but we think the illustration is very telling on stocking length at this period. Notice the Pittsburgh boy in 1906 who wears black long stockings with either short knee pants or unusually high above-the=knee knickers. These stockings obviously come up to at least mid thigh. For him, just over-the-knee stockings wouldn't have been long enough. Perhaps we can explain the longer length of the stockings in these photos by supposing that they were not standard purchase in a store but home-knit. However, in the case of the Spencer family, we know that the family tended to purchase such items as stockings. Middle-class and upper-class American families at the turn of the 20th century and afterwards tended to buy stockings rather than knit them at home. Compare these American photos showing very long long stockings with an American boy wearing above the knee knickers in the 1910s where the stockings are so short that the clasps of the hose supporters are visible. During the 1920s and 1930s there seems to have been some variety of length. We see images of boys with longish short knee pants and medium-length stockings in the early 20th century. We see both boys and girls wearing shorter length cloyhing with the relatively short long stockings that had beeen common earlier. An example is a Wards's ad for long stockings (1922) showing a girl with short long stockings, just over the knee. Boys wore long stockings with both kneepants and knickers--both ablove and below the knee knickers. We note an American boy (1921-22) wearing above-the-knee knickers with medium length long stockings.